Waco Expert Said Case Was 'Solved'

NewsMax.com Tuesday, May 30, 2000

"I’ve solved the case," said Carlos Ghigliotti. "I know exactly what happened."

A month later the man who told Washington Post reporter Richard Leiby he had wrapped up the case proving the FBI had fired on the Branch Davidian compound as it was being consumed in flames was dead, at the age of 42, of an apparent heart attack.

Not so unusual, Leiby intones. After all, Ghigliotti was a junk food eater who slept on an air mattress in his office.

Initially, police said his death was being treated as a homicide. Later a medical examiner would conclude he died of a heart attack, citing extensive coronary artery blockage revealed during autopsy.

In a wide-ranging story of his extensive contacts with Ghigliotti titled The Man Who Knew Too Much, Post reporter Leiby first learned of his death when he called the man’s office and got a police sergeant instead of Ghigliotti. When Leiby identified himself as a reporter the officer said, "I can’t discuss anything with you right now," and hung up.

That was April 28. Leiby quickly learned that Ghigliotti--one of the world’s foremost experts on the arcane specialty of thermal imaging analysis, was dead. His badly decomposed body had been found dressed in pajamas and lying on an air mattress. He had been dead for some time.

Noting that his phone rang off the hook with calls suggesting that Ghigliotti had met with foul play, the Post reporter introduced a theme that ran through his long and detailed story--people questioning the circumstances of the man’s death are "paranoiacs," loonies awash in conspiracy theories, the X-Files and UFO lore.

Here’s how he put it: The Internet boiled over with conspiracy theories. ‘Carlos Ghigliotti,’ stated one typical message, ‘was a man who knew too much.’ On Web sites like www.freerepublic.com, his name was put on lists with others who had allegedly perished from ‘Arkancide’-- that’s what the paranoiacs called other untimely deaths they’d somehow linked to the Clinton administration.

Yet Leiby, who by his own account was close to Ghigliotti, gives a rather complete account of Ghigliotti’s work on the Waco case and the conclusions he reached about the evidence he had examined.

Much of what he reports about Ghigliotti’s informed conclusions about the events of that final fiery end of the Waco standoff dovetail with what the expert had told lawyer David Hardy and was first revealed on NewsMax.com.

As he had with Leiby in the final weeks of his life, Ghigliotti told Hardy that he had solid proof that the FBI was lying when they claimed they had not fired at the rear part of the flaming building.

"Carlos ... had found the holy grail," Hardy wrote.

"He had proof that the FBI was lying."

Ghigliotti told the Post reporter much the same thing--he was onto something big.

Ghigliotti had been working for the House Government Reform Committee last year investigating charges that FBI agents had fired at members of the Branch Davidian sect, trapping helpless women and children inside the burning compound on April 19, 1993.

Last fall I had quoted him in The Post," Leiby wrote, as saying that infrared surveillance tapes--as well as regular videos made by the media--contained proof that the FBI fired: The gunfire ... is there, without a doubt.

In March he was finalizing his report to Congress, and he also had been advising attorneys waging a $100 million wrongful death suit against the government on behalf of the Davidians and their heirs. ‘I still have a lot of shocking evidence to show you,’ he wrote in a March 28 letter to Michael Caddell, the lead attorney in that case.

The focus of Ghigliotti’s probe were copies of the so-called FLIR (Forward Looking Infra Red) tapes that he had spent years studying, using some of the most sophisticated equipment and technology available. Those tapes, his analysis showed, contained proof that there had been a fusillade of gunfire from both outside and inside the compound, proving that the FBI was shooting at the people inside and they were returning fire.

But despite his forthright repetition of Ghigliotti’s claims, Leiby displays the Post’s bias against those who insist that the government has repeatedly lied and who believe that it is only rational to question the circumstances of the death of the "man who knew too much."

Moreover, he continues to identify the so-called independent experts at Vector Data Systems, the company hired by the court in the Branch Davidian’s wrongful death lawsuit, as a "British" company (he called them "a new batch of British infrared experts"), giving the firm an aura of implied impartiality it does not deserve. The company is American owned and does a substantial amount of work for the FBI--a very interested party in the case.

Time and again he returns to his paranoiacs theme.

"The coroner performed toxicology tests and found no chemical substances except an over-the-counter flu remedy," he wrote. Nevertheless, on the Internet there continued to be suggestions that Carlos was (a) killed by anthrax, which creates flu-like symptoms, or (b) survives as a government agent--paid off handsomely to allow a pauper’s corpse to be planted in his office.

’Let the crazies think what they want to think,’ says [Ghigliotti’s sister] Claire, sounding just as hard-nosed as her brother. She’s no believer in conspiracies. Except ...

’I saw the tapes,’ she says. Once last fall her brother stayed at her home, paranoid, believing his life was in danger. He made her watch everything.

’He did a second-by-second analysis of where, what, when.’

So the FBI is lying?

’Of course,’ she says. ‘Every one of them lied.’

Claire decided to have her brother buried, not cremated--just in case, she says. Because maybe, someday, he might need to be exhumed.

Leiby betrays much respect for Ghigliotti, sparing him any implication of being one of those paranoiac crazies who see conspiracy everywhere. But he manages to give the impression of a sane and rational investigator working on a case and reaching many of the same conclusions being peddled by a bunch of lunatic conspiracy theorists.

He brings on stage such characters as one Gordon Novel, a private investigator who first brought the Waco case to Ghigliotti.

Novel pushed the Arkancide theory. He asserted that deputy White House counsel Foster was assassinated in July 1993 ‘to shut him up’ about Waco and that Colby who drowned in a 1996 canoeing mishap had been killed because he’d corroborated the FLIR gunfire, he wrote, adding that (Novel also had an abiding interest in alien technology that he said was hidden at Area 51, but that’s another story.)

Like most members of the liberal mainstream media, Leiby seems to share their almost religious faith in coincidence--there was no connection between all those people who were in some way inconvenient to Mr. Clinton and his scandal-ridden administration and who died in often strange circumstances. Just a bunch of strange coincidences.

Aside from his harping on the subject, Leiby does a credible job of expressing Ghigliotti’s conclusion that the flashes shown on the FLIR tapes are gunfire, that FBI men can be seen firing at the compound and that the idea that the flashes are merely sunlight reflecting on shards of glass and other debris as the FBI and the "British" experts claim, is sheer nonsense.

And he does convey Ghigliotti’s near desperation in the final days of his life to get the facts out, whether through his work with the Burton committee or in his capacity as an expert witness in the Branch Davidian lawsuit.

And in this he is corroborated by Hardy, who had been given Ghigliotti’s more sensational revelations in those final weeks and was sworn to secrecy. He revealed what he knew only after Ghigliotti’s death.

What Hardy learned when he visited Ghigliotti’s laboratory in Maryland late last year was earthshaking in its impact on the case.

Here’s some of what he told NewsMax.

A portion of the FLIR video actually showed a bullet in flight. In the midst of the image a strange flash occurred, perhaps ten feet long.

"I asked what it was--clearly it was too long for a gun flash," Hardy said.

’That’s a bullet in flight,’ Carlos said. I knew that a bullet after firing is far too hot to pick up, but I’d never realized they could be seen in infrared. I asked him if he was sure.

’I’ve imaged them when I’ve flown over shooting ranges. I know what I see there,’ was his reply.

’Now, let’s see what he was shooting at.’ He pointed to a spot in the gym wreckage. The unmistakable image of a human being was there, jumping up from behind the cover of one pile of wreckage and sprinting to dive behind another. The bullet flash came just after he dove down.

’Missed him by half a second,’ Carlos said. I almost gasped. On my FLIR copies--previously described as first generation, the best you could get--the flash was visible but the man was not.

Carlos’ copy, and equipment--and his eye for detail--had found the holy grail.

He had proof that the FBI was lying.

FBI agents had dismounted from the tanks and engaged in a foot assault, invading the building. ‘Yes,’ Carlos said, ‘they’re lying.’